The $18-Billion Prize: A play about a dark side of the environmental movement

My new play exposes how environmentalists carried out the world’s biggest fraud, how the media helped promote the fraud, and how they almost got away with it. …

It tells the story of a lawsuit, led by New York lawyer Steven Donziger, against the Chevron oil company. The lawsuit alleged Chevron destroyed the rainforest in Ecuador and poisoned the natives. It was successful, and an Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs a staggering $18 billion. Yes, BILLION. This was the biggest ever award in a civil court, but it was ALSO the biggest fraud in history.

As always today, the media is the problem.

Haven’t heard about it?? Funny. The same media that reported endlessly on the so-called “pollution” went pretty quiet when the case turned out to be a fraud.

And a load of Hollywood celebrities who helped promote the fraud have also gone very quiet recently. Yes I’m talking about you Sting, Mia Farrow and Danny Glover.

The play shows how the plaintiffs, led by Donziger, bribed the judge and ghost wrote the judgment that awarded them this massive amount. And they were helped on their fraud by a cheerleading media that reported the allegations as fact but have been silent as the truth was revealed. …

The play … is hilarious in places, revealing the madness and hypocrisy of the celebrities who went to Ecuador to “support the natives.” It turns some of them were secretly paid an absolute fortune, and you will laugh and cry when you see how they behaved when they thought the cameras were switched off. They also didn’t know it was all recorded in his files by Steven Donziger.

The $18-Billion Prize reveals the dark side of the environmental movement, where campaigners such as Donziger go to remote locations and use locals as props in their ideological war against American corporations. In one of the most outrageous examples, Donziger secretly fought and stopped the Ecuadorian government from cleaning up their pollution because it wouldn’t look good for his case. Donziger was also going to become very rich in the process. He stood to pocket $1.2 billion before the fraud was uncovered.

And it’s not just the media who cannot stomach a story about environmentalists doing bad:

Phelim discovered that some actors can’t handle the truth … even in a paying gig, Kevin Mooney reported on Tuesday:

… Sources who are close to the actor have informed me that an actor who was playing the part of a New York City attorney named Steven Donziger stormed off the set after the second rehearsal.

Apparently, the actor had difficultly performing the part because it cast the environmental movement in a negative light, the sources say. …

“The $18-Billion Prize reveals a dirty secret that many environmental lawsuits are frauds based on outrageous claims and sometimes outright lies and that the media are little more than stenographers for these liars,” McAleer said in an email. He also criticized “Hollywood elites” who give cover to false claims. …

Donziger was also going to become very rich in the process. He stood to pocket $1.2 billion before the fraud was uncovered. …

They’re are only actors — the words are written by someone else, and their job is just to say the words and fake emotion. They are paid to perform, not politick. But sometimes confusions arises:

The most amusing example of this came a couple of years back, when a Twitter troll tried to claim my friend Adam Baldwin was a racist because of his dialogue as “Animal Mother” in Full Metal Jacket. Adam explained in a kindly enough fashion that, erm, actors perform from a script and that not all characters in film and stage are supposed to be sympathetic. Does anyone think that Sir Anthony Hopkins was endorsing cannibalism in The Silence of the Lambs? Or even, God forbid, serving Chianti with fava beans? Come on, man.

In this case, though Phelim may have a point of view, … Donziger’s diaries speak for themselves. So does the court record. And it’s a paying gig. So on what basis would an actor walk out on such a production after first agreeing to play the part? What’s the ethical conflict in this situation? Even if you don’t share Phelim’s POV on radical environmentalists, the issue at hand is massive fraud and corruption.